fox flux

Hey: this game is mildly NSFW. There are pixel boobies. Don't play it while your boss is watching.

Do you enjoy being forcibly turned into things for the sake of some fairly gentle puzzle-platforming? Wow, weird. But maybe you'll enjoy fox flux!

That's it, that's the whole pitch. It's kinda like Wario Land 3, but horny. Or hornier, depending on how you feel about Wario Land 3.

I made this in a month for my own
Strawberry Jam, but I have a lot of leftover ideas and would like to expand on it in the future! Stay tuned.

Runs on anything resembling a computer. Saves automatically, so feel free to quit at any time. Gamepads are supported. The only controls are the four directions, spacebar (or the A button) to jump, E (or the X button) to interact. Also, Esc (or the Start button) for the menu.

The game is... medium-short? I haven't played through the entire thing in a single sitting, and it depends whether you're going for max%. Rough guess is about an hour for an average playthrough.

Thank you glip for the music, title screen art, Lop sprites, and endless art advice!

I'm aware of a few minor bugs, and I expect there'll be a few major ones I haven't run into. Sorry! Jam game and all.

Comments

Not just that the amount of different levels and little game mechanics is amazingly high, I also adored the pretty funny (and horny) background story of this platformer! Thank you very much for that cute game, I happily included it in our compilation article about the Strawberry Jam as well as in the related showcase video. <3 Thanks for running this jam! :) It's always fun to see what people come up with.

Definitely try the Wario Land series, all of them except the newest, gamecube, and oldest ones use transformations to solve puzzles too. I'd personally recommend Wario Land 4, but 2 and 3 are good too!

Hm, that's a shame. I had a bit of slowdown in those, but thought I fixed it. How good is your computer, very roughly? I've got a fairly beefy machine for development reasons so it's hard to tell how much wiggle room I have.

Pretty neat overall, I'm surprised you were able to do so much in a month. Having the cable tiles update once a frame is a pretty slick effect, I wish I thought of it. Different conversation responses depending on what form you're in is a nice touch.

1-2 was a slog to collect everything in, you have to do everything in a very specific order and if you mess anything up you have to start over again. Exacerbated by the blind fall or two you need to do in the level.

Nitpicks:

The walking animation would probably look better played at about double speed, Lexy looks like she's sliding.

The tail being straight down in the rising sprite and straight up in the falling sprite only makes sense if she were jumping straight up and down, maybe just have it lower and raise a bit instead.

Parallax is a bit wonky, seems to only affect horizontal movement and not vertical.

On keyboard the movement keys are on the right and the action keys on the left. I know PICO-8 pushes this but generally I think it's a bad setup.

Wires updating once per frame was more of a way to avoid having very long wires potentially hold up an update, but I do like the visual effect. I'd kinda like to make it time-controlled instead, even.

Yeah, I know forest 2 is a bit... massive. There's a tricky balance to strike here: you only need ~⅔ of the hearts, so surely some of them should be harder to get, so going for 100% is actually an accomplishment and not something that happens naturally just from walking through the levels. But at the same time, making them too hard will frustrate people who are trying for 100%, even though the game doesn't require it and nothing actually changes.

Ha. Lexy used to walk faster, too. I kinda want to do something clever here, like sync the walking animation framerate to Lexy's movement speed.

The tail is, uh, mostly positioned that way because I ran out of space in the frame. :) I extended it downwards for the sake of jumping, but extending it leftwards would mean I have to fix a bunch of anchors, and apparently I was too lazy.

I'm not particularly happy with the parallax, yeah. The forest ought to be visible for much longer when moving upwards, but even in the hub it's half-buried beneath the ground. I even had multiple layers I wanted to add in, but the math was not working out and I didn't have time to sort it all out.

Uggh, controls. The movement keys are on the right on a keyboard, even if you use the numpad... but a lot of games use WASD, which is on the left, so you can still use the mouse, and of course that's where they are on controllers. I don't know, I wish there were a decent standard here; I've also had people complain that I didn't use Z and X. I do like access to the I key for the inventory, so maybe sometime I'll try a WASD + JKL sort of thing, though that puts my hands kind of close together...

I synced the walking animation framerate to the character's movement speed on my own game, and I'm pretty happy with the effect. I'm sure you won't have much trouble figuring it out yourself if you decide to do it.

WASD+JKL is probably what I would use for my own game, if I had the option. I suppose there's something to be said for allowing people to customize the controls. I look forward to moving on from PICO-8 so I can avoid the control restrictions, among others.